Gradual adjustment to the rugged sylvan dimension of a New World enabled settlers to rejoice in the “bee-loud glade”; but for the natives, the sound of the bees had a more ominous connotation.
… the movement of men was to the west,
as the slow advance
of bees
through the woods
meant to the Indians
in a year, an axe would be heard.
Each coffin hollowed out
as a canoe. Each set backwards on a river,
underground.
It has not much been told from the perspective of those who suffered first epidemic and then actual invasion—the microbial assault that spread far more rapidly and pervasively than their human hosts.* For some, like Susan Howe, reflecting on early colonial history, “In the machinery of injustice / my whole being is Vision”—where Vision is the “understory of anotherword.” The understory expanded from microbial to colonial agents, culminating in the state-sanctioned exterminating vendetta of “relocation” to which tribes like the Apache were subjected after the Civil War. Ed Dorn tellingly writes,
They were sentenced to observe
the destruction of their World
The revolutionary implications
are interesting
They embody a state
which our still encircled world
looks toward from the past.
Wherever we find that “the share of language is a yearning,” in Kenneth Irby’s words, America is at hand with its abrasive testimony.
How long did it last, that Paradise?
never longer than it took those French to travel North along the coast
to Maine
April to May 1524—the open welcome of the New World
willingness all eager to embrace
took one toke from those who only wanted to go East for riches
and the shit was shot.
W. S. Merwin’s “one-armed explorer / [who] could touch only half of the country”—having lost his hand—“groped on / for the virgin land // and found where it had been.”
… the alien world, the new world about him, that might have been Paradise but was before his eyes already cleard back in a holocaust of burning Indians,
trees and grasslands, reduced to his real estate, his projects of exploitation and profitable wastes …
~
Here is a map of our country:
here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt
This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin
we dare not taste its water
This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms
This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms
This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy
~
The magic we have is that we do not believe in magic
and will not retreat.
~
… one’s forced
considering America,
to a single truth : the newness
the first men knew was almost
from the start dirtied
by second comers. About seven years
and you can carry cinders
in your hand for what
America was worth
~
7 years & you cld carry cinders in yr hand
for what the country was worth broken
on the body
on the wheel of a new
body
a new social body
~
A noise in the head of the prince. A noise that travels a long ways
Past chances, broken pieces of lumber,
“Time future,” the golden head said,
“Time present. Time past.”
And the slumbering apprentice never dared to tell the master. A noise.
It annoys me to look at this country
~
where some outcast people find a place at last and others wander
with an open and unplaceable heart in this most enforced of all wildernesses.
~
… or of how we might
plead our case in the face of Sartre’s observation
that this is a nation where those who care
are the damned of the earth
~
disposal so complete
is quite unbelievable
… the manner in which they dispense
with our world, i.e.,
how did we come to invade it, how
did we get
here, in their clutches, where are
we to go?
~
… how many waves
of hell and death and
dirt and shit
meaningless waves of hurt and punished lives shall America
be nothing but the story of
~
… o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
when even you, when sound itself is neoned in?
~
… in a society like America energy if it is not moral is only
material. Which cannot be destroyed is never destroyed is only
left all over the place. Junk.
~
I don’t want to know
wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials
and so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly
over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in
another season, light and music still pouring over
our fissured, cracked terrain.
~
The cars run in a void of utensils—the powerful tires—beyond
Happiness
~
Tough rubbery gear of invaders, of the descendents
Of invaders.
In the car, in Robert Penn Warren’s “Going West,”
With tire song lulling like love, gaze riding white ribbon, forward
You plunge. Blur of burnt goldness
Past eye-edge on each
Side back-whirling, you arrow
Into the heart of hypnosis.
This is one way to write the history of America.
But this rapture of motor and open road is marked by a blunt carnage of “wing-burst,” and all that is visible is
The bloody explosion, right in my face,
On the windshield, the sun and
The whole land forward, forever,
All washed in blood, in feathers, in gut-scrawl.
Warren’s bloody windshield, like Snyder’s chronicle of “The Dead by the Side of the Road” and William Stafford’s fallen deer, is a totem of alarm. “And by this we are carried into the incalculable,” wrote George Oppen.
Strange to be here, strange for them also, insane
and criminal, who hasn’t noticed that, strange to
be man, we have come rather far
We are at the beginning of a radical depopulation of the earth.
Oppen’s warning is addressed not to the narcotized consciousness of the affluent American fairyland (“hygienic of / views not viable to this soil” where “The dust of intolerable social conditions packed like melting bombs floats the grease of the human condition”—or “Grimed tributaries to an ancient flow” in Hart Crane’s line), but to those who know that the endless future world war is already well underway, and that this land is fueling—but ultimately fuel for—this war. (“One can be looted, burned, / bombed, etc., in company, / a Second World War sequel for real, / altogether, now and forever”; or Muriel Rukeyser : “American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict …. We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; on another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare” [Life of Poetry, 61]; “How much of it is still true with gene-pool smashed, / the end of knowing,” John Clarke wonders about “a world of ritual but no more time”). “Total war / has been uninstructive”; but “the gathered gestures of historic particulars do not extricate from direction the concentrations of responsibility”; “We will produce no sane man again.”